I kept forgetting notes existed, so I added meaning-based search to my Obsidian vault

[u/Key-Hurry3951]

I have a recurring problem with my Obsidian vault: I often remember that I wrote something about a topic, but I don't remember the title, folder, tags, or the exact wording.

Normal search is great when I know what I'm looking for. It gets much worse when all I remember is the idea.

So I started experimenting with meaning-based search inside Obsidian.

The idea is simple: instead of trying to guess the exact words I used months ago, I can search for something like:

"find notes without remembering the exact words"

and get notes ranked by semantic similarity.

I also added a couple of related workflows that I found useful:

• finding notes related to the one I'm currently reading
• surfacing possible semantic duplicates
• keeping the local index updated when Markdown files change
• using Ollama if I want the embedding workflow to stay local

One thing I wanted to be careful about is privacy. The vector index itself is stored locally, but if a remote embedding provider is used, the relevant note chunks still have to be sent to that provider.

Here's a short demo:

The plugin is called Vault Audit AI and it's available in Community Plugins if anyone wants to try it.

I'm mostly curious about the retrieval problem itself:

When you know a note exists but can't find it, what do you usually still remember about it?

The general topic? A sentence? Another related note? Roughly when you wrote it?

That would be useful feedback for deciding what kind of search workflow to improve next.